Against many odds, breast cancer strikes N.J. man

By LORRAINE ASH(Morristown, N.J.) Daily Record

Thursday

Sep 30, 2010 at 8:00 AM

At 2 o’clock one morning in May 2007, Brian Brodhead was home in Long Valley, N.J., awake but lying in bed and idly rubbing his chest. He felt something under his left nipple.“I continued to touch it and realized it wasn’t my nipple,” he recalled. “I woke up my wife and said, “Tell me this isn’t what I think it is.’ She said, “Yeah, I feel a lump.’ She went back to sleep. I didn’t.”The next morning Brodhead, cautious but not alarmed, made an appointment to see his doctor. His wife, Pamela, told him what to expect when he got a mammogram. She then proceeded to leave for a five-day trip to Mississippi to do relief work.“We both thought it was just a fatty mass, a product of middle age,” she recalled. “We never thought it was cancer. If it were me, I’d have thought differently. But Brian, no.”At the time Brodhead was 53. He was physically fit and worked out at a gym every morning before going to his job as a maintenance supervisor at Morristown National Historical Park. That is still his routine.When Brodhead searched his family history for cases of breast cancer, he came up with one female cousin who had had a benign lump removed. He tested negative for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 breast cancer genes.Besides, less than 1 percent of all breast cancers occur in men, anyway, according to the National Cancer Institute, which reports the disease usually is detected in men between 60 and 70 years old.Additionally, most breast lumps detected in men are not cancerous.“Their lumps tend to be medication-induced, or they’re because of liver disease,” said Dr. Stephen Schreibman of Oncology & Hematology Specialists, based in Morristown and Denville.In other words, the odds were heavily against Brodhead having breast cancer. After his mammogram, he had an ultrasound, proceeding just as a woman would. Treatments - and survival rates - for men with breast cancer are the same as those for women, according to the National Cancer Institute.After his ultrasound, Brodhead was referred to Dr. William Diehl, a Morristown surgeon who removed the lump. A week after the lumpectomy the doctor called Brodhead on his cell phone.“I told him I was sitting in a local bar,” Brodhead recalled, “and he said, “Probably a good thing. You have a little bit of cancer.’ I felt like I was the guy that got the short straw. Out of all the things that could possibly happen to me, why did I get breast cancer?“He asked Diehl what they’d do next.“Not getting terribly down on it,“ Brodhead said. “Just wanting to move on to what we could do.“

Surgeries followNext came a modified mastectomy with removal of his nipple and three lymph nodes, two of which tested positive. The news is typical for men with breast cancer, according to Schreibman, one of Brodhead’s doctors.“Men generally are further along when they’re diagnosed because they don’t get mammograms, so the diagnosis is often made when there is already a palpable mass,“ Schreibman said. “It’s not uncommon to have metastases, or involvement of the lymph glands in the axilla (armpit).“As Brodhead absorbed the news that his cancer had started to spread, his family’s sense of surreality swelled.“We thought, “It’s in his lymph nodes! Wow,’ ” said Pamela, who encouraged their son, Daniel, then a fifth-grader, to talk about his emotions and what was going on.Next came Brodhead’s third procedure - removing 24 lymph nodes, all of which tested negative. After that good news, Pamela said, the family was able to start emerging from a state of feeling stunned.But the odyssey was not over. Without chemotherapy and radiation, Brodhead’s survival rate was estimated at 85 percent. That wasn’t high enough for him, so he opted for eight rounds of high-dose chemotherapy over 16 weeks. During the first four treatments, he lost his hair. Brodhead shrugged that off.“I was going bald, anyway,” he said.But it was less easy to endure the final four treatments, which caused excruciating pain from his knees to his ankles and caused his toenails to soften and fall off.“They grew back,” Brodhead said. “These are the drawbacks of getting better.”

Radiation treatmentComparatively, radiation was easy. Those 35 treatments left him with a little less hair on his left chest and, since he used intensive care lotion, a tan instead of a burn. He said it took him longer to park his car and take off his shirt than it did to go through the radiation sessions.Being fit helped Brodhead recuperate from his three surgeries and endure his chemo.“My heart had to be tested before they’d give me the high-dose chemotherapy,” Brodhead said. “My heart was strong.”Through the whole experience, Brodhead lost only 2 1/2 weeks from work and never stopped going to the gym.“As hard as that was and as tired as I was, I kept going because I wanted to be healthy,” he said.Though his insurance company would have paid for breast reconstruction, he opted against it, thinking at his age it wasn’t necessary.“If I was 25, it might be a different story - 25, maybe not married, maybe really concerned about the way I look,” Brodhead said. “But now if I took my shirt off, the only thing you’d notice is that I have a small scar and no nipple. My wife loves me for who I am, not who I was.”Today Brodhead talks to any men who will listen that he is living proof that men get breast cancer.“Most of them say, “You didn’t have breast cancer. Men don’t get breast cancer,’ “ he said. “I tell them I wouldn’t be standing there telling them I had it if I didn’t.“He tells them to have their wives or girlfriends show them how to do a breast self-exam. He tells them nobody knows what life is going to throw at them.Today Brodhead, who gets checkups with Schreibman every four months, has one remaining beef. He doesn’t like that all breast cancers are represented with the color pink.“I think pink is for girls, blue is for boys,“ he said.Maybe, he thinks, men would become more aware of their own risk if male breast cancer had a color of its own.

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